Modern and Contemporary

Houses of the Wind
John Luther Adams
Cold Blue Music CB0063 (coldbluemusic.com)

The eerie vibrations created by Aeolian (wind) harps provide the central source of inspiration and sonic material for John Luther Adams’ latest release, Houses of the Wind. The album is a meditative journey in five wind-swept movements that transfix and bend all sense of the present moment. Using a series of layered field recordings of his own Aeolian harp, Adams creates slowly unfolding and otherworldly shimmerings as if slowly floating through a cave of gypsum. Low rumbles form as glacial resonances that crystalize into mountainous radiant spectra. The gentle ambiance of this sound world is at once distant hopelessness and point blank serenity. 

This duality of despair and transcendence permeates throughout, creating a liminal experience for the listener. As one who advocates for the health of the earth, Adams provides a reminder of nature’s fragile and yet tremendous force. But rather than a didactic offering, Adams invites us to pause and think about the space we inhabit. A convergence of music, emotion and nature, this release provides a sense of longing but also peace.

John Adams
Tonhalle Orchester Zürich; Paavo Järvi
Alpha ALPHA874 (outhere-music.com/en/labels/alpha-classics)

John Adams (b.1947) has long been considered among today’s leading American composers, particularly after the success of his operas Nixon in China (1987) and the controversial The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). This album of four orchestral works was the fruit of his 2021-22 Residency with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich directed by Paavo Järvi.

Having discovered musical minimalism in the 1970s, Adams’ works characteristic of that style include the fanfare-like Tromba Lontana (1985/86). Adams’ compositional style has since continuously evolved, incorporating musical influences including numerous Western classical as well as vernacular American styles: jazz, pop and rock.

In the 1990s Adams produced the brilliantly orchestrated, effervescent Slonimsky’s Earbox, in part drawing on early-period Stravinsky stylistic cues. Adams retroactively observed that the work points “toward a successful integration of the older minimalist techniques (repetitive motifs, steady background pulse and stable harmonic areas) and the more complex, more actively contrapuntal language of the post-Klinghoffer pieces.” Järvi demonstrates a sure command of the work’s web of stylistic allusions. 

The rollicking Lollapalooza was also composed in 1995. Today the American word “lollapalooza” means something oversized and perhaps outlandish, features reflected in Adam’s exuberant music. 

Adams considers his three-part tone poem My father Knew Charles Ives his “Proustian madeleine, although one with a Yankee flavor.” In this complex mature orchestral work,, Adams draws on his New England heritage, specifically reflecting the Connecticut composer Ives’ pervading musical influence.

This outstanding portrait of Adams’ orchestral oeuvre is a fine way to celebrate the composer’s 75th birthday.

Lou Harrison – Sonata for Unaccompanied  Violin
Kate Stenberg
Other Minds Records OM 1036-2 (otherminds.org)

With roots back to Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, Paganini’s Caprices and Eugene Ysaÿe’s Sonatas, the continuous stream of solo violin composition is among Western classical music’s highlights. This premiere recording of American composer Lou Harrison’s concise early-career Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin (1936) makes a convincing case for a niche in that rich canon. Composed when Harrison was a precocious teenaged composition student, it’s tempting to locate this adventurous modernist work within the genre’s lineage. It’s interesting to note that Bartók’s iconic Sonata for Solo Violin was composed some eight years later. 

In three tightly-knit movements Harrison’s Sonata employs aspects of the 12-tone compositional technique he was studying at the time with Henry Cowell, which Harrison characteristically modified. Aggressively dissonant fanfare-like chords open the work, which segue to angular melodies. The score also introduces glissandi, alluding to a microtonal musical landscape which Harrison extensively explored in his later work to influential effect.

The second movement maintains the texture of angular chromaticism spiked with glissandi,  enlivened however with dance-friendly rhythms. (It’s relevant to mention that Harrison was an avid dancer.)

My favourite movement is the soft and mysterious-sounding finale which introduces pizzicati and returns to previously stated motifs. The work eloquently evaporates into silence with an interval of a falling major third. 

New music violin-specialist Kate Stenberg’s committed and assured performance sets the bar high for this work. Is Harrison’s seven-minute Sonata too short to merit the jewel-box CD treatment it gets here?  I’d say it’s just the right, satisfying length.

Weather Systems I – A Hard Rain
Steven Schick
Islandia Music Records IMR011 (islandiamusicshop.com)

The 2CD Weather Systems I: A Hard Rain features outstanding solo performances by Steven Schick (b.1954), a Percussion Hall of Famer who has long championed contemporary percussion music. The genesis of the album arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the lockdown Schick revisited “the foundational works for solo percussion, many of which I have played for nearly 50 years.” This became the starting point for A Hard Rain. 

It opens with a vivid recording of John Cage’s 27’10.554” for a percussionist, a work Schick describes as “a rainforest of sounds: of water, earth, and air; of rip-sawn wood and ancient metal.”

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zyklus‘ use of the cycle motif appears in the spatial layout of the instruments: in a circle around the solo percussionist. I hear echoes of Cold War tensions in Schick’s nervous rendition. Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark on the other hand is a world removed aesthetically from Stockhausen’s Euro angst, inviting the musician to approach the work with soft, spare, almost meditative gestures.

For his final track Schick uses only his voice to give a dramatic 32-minute performance of Ursonate (1922-32), Kurt Schwitters’ four-movement “sonata in primal sounds.” Schick collaborated with electronic musician Shahrokh Yadegari to present this milestone sound poem with the aid of effective interactive loops, layerings and treatments of his voice.

Schick writes that the non-sense of Schwtters’ Ursonate “is actually the language of crisis,” echoing the destruction of war, as well as serving as a post-Dadaist provocation. Coming after a program of signature solo percussion works, this tour-de-force version of Ursonate challenges listeners to expand their notions of what percussion music is – and can be.